Archive | March, 2010

Now here’s corporate thinking to believe in, gotta please those shareholders. As the author of the article says, eating fewer chips potato chips is not an option. Hamilton Nolan writes on Gawker:

Health food manufacturer and exponentially dimensionalized fulcrum of universal gravity PepsiCo is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to make America healthier, with things like “designer” salt crystals for Lay’s potato chips. What else could they do?

Because of inherent concern about the health of you, the consumer, PepsiCo spent more than $400 million in product development costs last year, all with an eye towards developing products that will kill Americans more slowly. “What we want to do with our ‘fun for you’ products is to make them the healthiest ‘fun for you’ products,” said PepsiCo chairman Indra Nooyi, emphasizing PepsiCo’s dual commitment to health and to providing a nonstop party in your mouth.

One Russian farmer decided to equip his cow barn with … LED TVs.
He has got from somewhere the information that cows get more happy and productive if they watch the movies with the juicy green fields. So he got a non-stop loop of world’s recognized green Swiss Alpine fields and got the most slim LCD TVs on market in Russia and then called the team of workers to install that all.
Now they go into statistics to measure the outcomes. They compare the results from two groups of cows, one is watching TV another is deprived of this humanity most spread entertainment thing.

BBC News reports on Belgium’s banning of face-covering Islamic veils for women, making the nation the first in Europe to do so. Similar laws may be on the way in other places:

A Belgian parliamentary committee has voted to ban face-covering Islamic veils from being worn in public. France is also considering restricting face-covering veils.

There are several types of headscarves and veils for Muslim women – those that cover the face being the niqab and the burka. The BBC’s Dominic Hughes reports from Brussels that there are about 500,000 Muslims in Belgium, and the Belgian Muslim Council says only a couple of dozen wear full-face veils.

Denis Ducarme, from the Belgian centre-right Reformist Movement that proposed the bill, said he was “proud that Belgium would be the first country in Europe which dares to legislate on this sensitive matter.”

But the proposal has alarmed some who see it as an attack on civil liberties.

Down in the dumps? Stuck in a rut? It might be because your eyes aren’t white enough, making you unattractive and unlovable. Luckily, there’s a serious medical procedure to fix this; ABC reports on the growing popularity of eye-whitening surgery. It costs $3,000 to $5,000 (that’s per eye), possible side effects include dry eyes, scarring, and infection, and it’s almost as effective as using eye drops:

As a lawyer Steven Smith works long hours and reads a lot of fine print. But he blames years of sun exposure for making his eyes red.

It irritates him when people tell him how tired he looks. So when his ophthalmologist, Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler, described the new eye-whitening procedure called I-BRITE, Smith decided to give it a try. I-BRITE is basically a procedure called conjunctivoplasty, a procedure that’s been around for decades. Surgeons use this to remove pterygium, or growths in the eyes.

Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov has said his group was behind Monday's double suicide bombings on the Moscow Metro, which left 39 people dead.
In a video message posted on a Chechen rebel website, he said he had personally ordered the attacks.
He said they were carried out in retaliation for the killings of "poor Chechen and Ingush residents" by the Russian security forces in February. Doku Umarov also warned Russia to prepare for more attacks.
Russian investigators have said they believe two female suicide bombers were linked to militants in the North Caucasus. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called on the security forces to "scrape from the sewers" those responsible for the Moscow attacks.

It's been less than a week since an initiative to legalize marijuana and tax it was put on the November ballot. And campaign organizers are not wasting any time gaining supporters, and financial backing.The campaign to legalize marijuana has relied steadily on the internet and word of mouth. Now, organizers are launching a radio ad.
But, opponents say the entire campaign is a waste of time.
With an initiative to legalize the recreational use of marijuana now on California's November ballot, the campaign to get it passed is gaining momentum. A web page is dedicated to the effort and the campaign's Facebook page has more than 43,000 fans.

Mimas has drawn a fair amount of attention with its “Death Star”-like appearance, but with new images from the Cassini spacecraft, this icy moon of Saturn has just gotten a lot more interesting. The highest-resolution-yet temperature map and images of Mimas reveal surprising patterns on the surface of the small moon, including unexpected hot regions that resemble “Pac-Man” eating the Death Star crater (officially known as Herschel Crater), as well as striking bands of light and dark in crater walls.

“After much deliberation, we have concluded: Mimas is NOT boring,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader, in an e-mail about the new images. “Who knew?!” And best of all, Porco added, “be sure you have a pair of red/green glasses handy ’cause you won’t want to miss peering into gigantic Herschel crater in 3D!”

Cassini collected the data on Feb. 13, and Porco said the team has spent some quality time poring over the images.

How cute. They use popcorn instead of cocaine.
Don't be too alarmed parents of small children ... I've already read this wasn't a real school play.
It's a music producer's (strange) sense of humor at work with professional child actors.

Headlines like "U.S. to sell entire stake in Citi at hefty profit" are complete BS. Dylan Ratigan explains in the first part of this clip below how we, the taxpayers, gave a total of $23.7 trillion to these banksters. $8.8 billion hardly makes a dent.
The greatest transfer ("theft") of wealth to bankers in the history of the world has happened, and the beneficiaries are in the heart of Manhattan. It's great for those folks, but has damaged the lives of many people living outside of that city across the country...

Cigarettes may contain traces of pig's blood, an Australian academic says with a warning that religious groups could find its undisclosed presence "very offensive".
University of Sydney Professor Simon Chapman points to recent Dutch research which identified 185 different industrial uses of a pig — including the use of its hemoglobin in cigarette filters.
Prof Chapman said the research offered an insight into the otherwise secretive world of cigarette manufacture, and it was likely to raise concerns for devout Muslims and Jews. Religious texts at the core of both of these faiths specifically ban the consumption of pork.
"I think that there would be some particularly devout groups who would find the idea that there were pig products in cigarettes to be very offensive," Prof Chapman said.